The Obscene Bird of Night

Idiot bird

in your idiot

id.

The Obscene Bird of Night:  

invisible to sight.

Lines its nest with your blood,

roosts, rots deep in every mind.                                             

The Obscene Bird of Night

eats his own excrement.

Would eat yours too.

Copulates with humans in dark clubs

when they fall unconscious from drink and drugs

Swoops into dank burials

to drink dried blood from witches’ corpses.

The Bird is sleek, gold-beaked

and beautiful, as are all things sublime,             

though radiating a pervasive scent of fecal slime.

It swallows the full moon:

a tumorous pellet in its gullet.

Excretes the moon into the sky, now green with droppings.

Fucks himself with his tail.

Chatters indelible nightmares into your dreams:

memories of your dying parents, their bodies slackening.

Yes, it warbles, of course

there are ghosts and witches and magic

and yes, evil is almost everywhere.

The Bird black-wings into your glaring insomnia,

plunges into your traumatized memories,

shrieks death and despair.

Molts its old feathers

for new barbed-wire plumage.         

In those same bleak depths where your sacred hopes rise

the Obscene Bird of Night takes flight,

pecks holes in them, until they are tatters,

just frail tales you wish for because of fear—

the fear that there is nothing to save us

from our profound inner dearth.               

The Bird’s scything talons scrape against

your visions of spiritual saviors struggling to rise,

shredding gossamer words of resurrection, love, mercy,

guardian angels and Arthur and Jesus and Messiah and Buddha and Kuan Yin and Mary.

Too long to wait for them—but the Bird is always within you.   

And there’s no waiting for the wolves howling below

at the backward thunder, the schizoid lightning

as it storms screeching untamed through your unsubdued forest 

that flowers and fructifies your life, that tragic wilderness of mind.